Menu

Semi-retired psychologist shares his experience.

The Five Stages of Enlightenment… by Bill Harris

The Five Stages of Enlightenment…by Bill Harris (May 19th, 2008), continued

Let me give you a brief tour of these five stages. I can’t, in a blog post, give you the experience of each stage (though my wife, when she read this post, told me that she experienced an altered state), but I can tell you a bit about them. I think you’ll find this very interesting. And, because some of you want shorter posts, I’ll take you through stages one, two, and three in this post, and then I’ll finish the Five Ranks with stages four and five in my next post.

First, I want to make a distinction between a state experience and a stage exerience. When you experience the transcendent while listening to Holosync, or with the Big Mind process, you are very likely having a state experience. You visit, and then, when your Holosync session ends, or the Big Mind process is over, you return to the relative world, the world of your mind, the world of subject-object, of me and not-me, of separate things and events.

In a stage experience, however, you permanently inhabit a place rather than just visiting. In my posts about the developmental process, each stage I described is a place you inhabit, not a place you visit. In terms of spiritual attainment, you might have a spontaneous experience of a higher stage, or you might have such a experience because of a practice you’re doing (Holosync, vipassana, TM, Big Mind, etc.). When the experience is over, though, you’re back where you were before. The experience becomes something that happened.

Later, if you have enough of these state experiences, you may get to the point where you fully embody that experience, at which point it becomes a stage you inhabit, rather than a place you visit. Instead of visiting, you embody the experience in every moment. Each visit, each state experience, does affect you, but it usually takes a while before these state experiences grow into a true stage experience, a permanent embodiment of a new and higher perspective.